Frank Parlato
If you laid out every issue in the Jerry Sandusky case — not the headlines, not the emotion, but the actual procedural record — no honest lawyer in America could tell you this man got a fair trial.
The Secret Meeting
Before the trial began, Judge John Cleland, the prosecution, and defense attorney Joe Amendola met in a hotel room. At that meeting, they agreed to an expedited trial. Nobody disclosed this meeting. Nobody put it on the record. It came to light four years later.
Judge Cleland was forced to admit it and then angrily recused himself from post conviction rulings.
Think about what that means. When Amendola later stood before Cleland and said he could not competently represent his client — that the government had dumped 12,000 pages of discovery on his one-man office just 10 days before trial — the judge already knew the fix was in. He had already agreed to rush this case. Cleland denied every request for a continuance.
In any other courtroom in America, a defense attorney telling a judge he cannot competently represent his client triggers a mistrial or, at minimum, an adjournment. Here, it triggered nothing. The trial went forward. The question is why. The answer was in the hotel room.
The Reluctant Accuser
Aaron Fisher, designated Victim Number One, twice failed to tell the grand jury that anything happened.
The prosecution’s first accuser — the one whose allegations launched the entire investigation — said nothing happened.
So how did Aaron Fisher become the cornerstone of the case? Through a therapist named Michael Gillum.
Gillum, a social worker, had a contract with the county paying him $65 per hour. He had recently emerged from bankruptcy. The more hours he billed, the more money he made. And he had Aaron Fisher.
Gillum accompanied Fisher to the grand jury — a proceeding where a therapist has no legal right to be present. He drove to court each day with representatives of the attorney general’s office. Between Fisher’s testimony sessions, according to the record, sedatives were administered. The boy who twice said nothing happened eventually said something did.
Fisher was pushed by his mother. He was treated by a financially motivated therapist. He was coached through the grand jury process. Before he testified he had a civil attorney.
And he became Victim Number One. He wound up with $7.5 million.
The 600 Who Said No
Law enforcement contacted approximately 600 former participants in Jerry Sandusky’s charity, The Second Mile. They were looking for victims.
All of them said the same thing: nothing happened. The attorney general’s office established a public hotline specifically for Sandusky victims. Out of 600 former Second Mile members and an open public solicitation, the prosecution assembled a total of seven men who willing to undergo therapy and develop memories of abuse when they were children. Some of them knew each other. All of them had civil lawyers. Some of them had joint repressed memory therapy sessions where under the direction of Penn State paid therapist Cyndy McNab, they helped each other remember..
Seven out of 600. And a hotline. After direct law enforcement contact. That’s a conversion rate of barely one percent — and that one percent required therapeutic intervention to produce.
The A.J. Dillon Sting
A man named A.J. Dillon decided to test the system. He went to attorney Andrew Shubin — the lawyer who represented several Sandusky accusers and had been advertising for victims.
Dillon told attorney Shubinthat Sandusky had molested him when he was a teen in a park behind Joe Paterno’s house.
Dillon was secretly recording the entire conversation.
Shubin took notes and told Dillon to come back. When Dillon returned, Shubin told him his story back — except the location had changed. The park behind Paterno’s house had become the Penn State showers. Shubin had rewritten the narrative to match the most financially valuable location. Penn State was planning on paying victims, not some public park.
This is not speculation. This is on tape.
Now consider: every single accuser’s story expanded between their initial police report, their grand jury testimony, their trial testimony, and their Penn State settlement intake forms. In every case, the stories grew. In every case, details were added that weren’t in the original account.
The Dillon recording shows us exactly how that expansion happened — an attorney reshaping a client’s story to fit the pattern that would maximize the payout.
The Corporal’s Slip
A State Police corporal, Joseph Leiter, who was involved in the investigation, was accidentally recorded speaking with a civil attorney about Accuser Number Four (Brett Swisher Houtz). His words, captured on tape: “We just tell them and tell them and tell them again until they change their story.”
That is not investigative technique. That is manufacturing testimony.
The Ghost Victims
Jerry Sandusky was convicted of crimes against ten accusers. Two of them — Victim Number Two and Victim Number Eight — were never identified. They never appeared at trial. They are, for all practical purposes, phantoms.
The evidence supporting Victim Number Two was the testimony of Mike McQueary, who said he witnessed something in a shower. No victim was ever found. No victim ever came forward. THe jury acquiited on the McQueary charge since his story was not credible.
The evidence supporting Victim Number Eight was worse. It was double hearsay — a janitor who claimed to have heard another janitor say that Sandusky had abused a boy.
Judge Cleland allowed this double hearsay into evidence. But here is what Cleland knew, or should have known: the prosecution possessed a recorded interview with the original janitor — the one who allegedly made the statement. In that recording, the original janitor said the opposite. He said Jerry Sandusky would never abuse a boy. He said he knew Sandusky and it didn’t happen.
The prosecution had the tape. They did not play it for the jury. The defense attorney never heard it either — because it was buried in 12,000 pages of discovery delivered at the last minute to a one-man law office that had been denied every request for additional time.
Robert Long wrote an entire book about this single issue. A man was convicted based on what one janitor said another janitor told him — while the actual janitor, on tape, said it never happened.
The Circular Lie
Here is the key to understanding how the Sandusky case was constructed. It is the dirty secret that nobody involved wants to confront.
Every accuser was lying — but each believed the others were telling the truth.
Accuser A says to himself: I’m lying, but it’s okay, because Accuser B and Accuser C are telling the truth. Sandusky really is guilty. So why shouldn’t I get my share of the money?
Accuser B says the same thing: I’m lying, but A and C are telling the truth. So what’s the harm?
Accuser C reasons identically.
The whole structure was a circular justification. Nobody needed to be telling the truth as long as everybody believed somebody else was. The prosecutors wanted to believe the accusers so they coached the weaker ones. The judge wanted to believe the prosecutors, so he expedited the trial and stripped the defense of preparation time. The jury believed the judge’s instructions, which told them to ignore the inconsistencies and focus on the volume of accusations.
And the volume of accusations was the product of a $65-an-hour therapist, an attorney who rewrote stories on tape, a law enforcement officer who admitted to telling witnesses what to say until they said it, and a financial pipeline that paid accusers between $1.5 million and $20 million from Penn State’s settlement fund.
The lowest-paid accuser received $1.5 million. His allegation: Jerry Sandusky hugged him.
The highest-paid accuser received $20 million. He was the one the prosecutors personally managed. He had the wildest story. That Sandusky locked him in his basement every weekend for three years, starved and raped him. He screamed for help but the soundproof basement (it was not soundproof) prevented anyone from hearing him.
Then on Sunday he would go back to his mother, say nothing and nothing at school all week. Then return agaion to be starved, raped a scream for three straight years. He got $20 million.
The Question
This is not about whether Jerry Sandusky is a sympathetic figure. It is not about whether child abuse is abhorrent. It is about whether the United States Constitution means what it says.
A secret meeting to predetermine the pace of a trial. A defense attorney denied the time to review discovery. Double hearsay admitted over a suppressed recording that contradicted it. Accusers whose stories expanded at every stage. An attorney caught on tape manufacturing a narrative. A law enforcement officer caught on tape coaching testimony. A therapist with a financial motive operating illegally inside a grand jury. Two victims who don’t exist.
Any one of these issues, standing alone, would warrant a new trial in an ordinary case. Together, they don’t just warrant a new trial. They demand one.
The question is whether the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has the integrity to allow it.
Because here’s the truth that nobody in the prosecution’s office wants to face: if Jerry Sandusky gets a new trial, they will never reassemble those eight accusers. Not after the Dillon tape. Not after the corporal’s recording. Not after the evolution of every single story is laid bare in a courtroom with a competent defense attorney.
They won’t retry him. They’ll have to let him go.
And that’s why they’ll fight to make sure he never gets the hearing he’s owed.
Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.
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